“First They Came for the Muslims”: Psychoanalytic reflections on the threat and the challenge of contemporary populism

Abstract

This paper is a response to the rise of populism across and beyond the Western world. It takes seriously the possibility that there are parallels between the unconscious dynamics underlying contemporary threats to liberal democracy and those which were mobilised during the inter‐war crisis in Europe. The paper explores how historical contexualization and ideological orientation shape psychoanalytic theorizing, with significant consequences for our conceptualizations of the nature of the “fascist” mind. It suggests that a “basic fault” in the evolution of nation states that seek to reconcile political democracy and economic anarchy provides the conditions in which irrationality and the politics of scapegoating is a permanent temptation. It is this, the paper argues, that provides the link between inter‐war fascism and the present rise of populist movements around the world.

What would Freud have made of it? Notes on a “normal pathological organization” within contemporary psychoanalysis

“…The primary examples of human destructiveness that occupy the authors are conventional: a heavy reliance on the Holocaust, with importance given also to the slave trade and slave-based economies. One of us has commented elsewhere on the difficulties involved in psychoanalytic explorations of evil that take Nazism as the paradigm case (Kemp, 2018a). We believe that in its unthinkable extremity, such a focus might interfere with a capacity to identify and engage with the "building blocks" of fascism within liberal democratic societies, and so be of little help in identifying the actual threats we face today.…”